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A glimpse into a new programming language under development at Microsoft

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Re: A glimpse into a new programming language under development at Microsoft

#151

Post by alok-g »

molsson wrote: post #150
alok-g wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Joe Duffy says "I’ve been granted 45 patents, with another 33 pending" >> Bragging about patents doesn't exactly make me like the guy. Genuinely asking, do you see putting information on patents as bragging or more generally as a negative? I have also been putting the same on my profile, so would like to understand your viewpoint better to see if I should remove it. My side of the story: I have nearly always worke…

Software patents are contentious issue for some people so it's not something I'd include in a CV or on an open accessible "about page".

I see. Issue is with software patents specifically, not patents in general. (Mine are mostly non-software.)

Re: A glimpse into a new programming language under development at Microsoft

#152

Post by dded »

alco wrote: post #122

YAGPL (yet another general-purpose language). I think we've had enough of those in the past decade. Each one has something new to offer, but at the same time it disperses attention of the programmer crowd and so less effort is put into each language's development. I think we need to experiment more with single-purpose languages. I'm not saying DSLs because those are mostly embedded syntactic constructs in existing la…

Do you have any "particular problem" in mind? You don't mention one.

I think the trouble with single-purpose languages is that, realistically, their development needs to be motivated by a real problem not satisfactorily addressed by an existing language. And since the people with these problems are not often going to be language designers, most such opportunities will be missed. I'm frankly surprised by the existence of Julia.

Re: A glimpse into a new programming language under development at Microsoft

#153

Post by catnaroek »

Sssnake wrote: post #147
sjs1234 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ack ... I'm largely ignorant of the details of go other than its original positioning. Do the semantics of go constrain gc implementation in such a way that it precludes low latency? Or is it just not a focus of the implementors?

>I'm largely ignorant of the details of go other than its original positioning It is a faster python with a very primitive type system tacked on. I don't know how they ended up there from their original idea of a systems language, but they did.

> It is a faster python with a very primitive type system tacked on.

And concurrency primitives in the core language. (In a properly designed language, these could have been made part of the standard library, though.)

And worse error-handling facilities than the original Python.

Re: A glimpse into a new programming language under development at Microsoft

#154

Post by _random_ »

sophacles wrote: post #126
_random_ wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's like saying "Java only works on old Nokia phones (yeah I know about all other ports of JVM)".

Not really. We've tried running several C# programs on mono, and as of a few months ago, the effort to port them so they will work on mono was pretty intense, and the performance was lacking. C# (especially when developed in VS) is a nice language and environment, but cross-platform is not one of it's strengths.

I am sure I would have similar issues with Java on *nix because of my lack of experience with both. Cross-platform is definitely a major C# strength at least in the mobile space given the power of Xamarin tool chain. Android and iOS do matter and they are not Windows.

Re: A glimpse into a new programming language under development at Microsoft

#155

Post by venomsnake »

pmelendez wrote: post #136
venomsnake wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt that C++ is chosen because of raw performance (both C# and Java are close enough), but mostly because of memory and cpu cycle determinism.

>"(both C# and Java are close enough)" Not really, a GC call in the middle of your render loop can drop your FPS rate significantly, and those cpu cycles are vital when you start adding physics simulation, not to mention the limitation of memory on consoles. Sure, Java and C# would be enough for minecraft or some xbox live puzzle game, but I really doubt that you could manage to write an Uncharted game in Java or C#…

A GC call cannot drop your FPS a lot, but it could add a lot of latency spikes and inconsistent framerates. Techreport's inside the second is amazing read on the subject.

So ... you will have slightly lower FPS (55 instead of 60) but much worse experience.

Re: A glimpse into a new programming language under development at Microsoft

#156

Post by throwawaykf03 »

thomasahle wrote: post #140
throwawaykf03 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bragging about patents doesn't exactly make me like the guy. Has he been living under a rock... No, you've been living in an echo chamber :-) Open source enthusiasts may well want to share their work for free (or statistically more likely, use others' work for free), but that's their prerogative. Most companies will not give away their competitive advantage and will seek to protect it anyway they can, and similarly…

> you have a lot of Google employees here, and Google is a bit handicapped when it comes to patents at the moment. This is why you hear a disproportionate amount of anti-patent rhetoric. Do you actually belive this? > most engineers are either ignorant about patents or quite proud of their patents. Cooperate America seems to be the only echo chamber that belives software patents are a pretty neat idea.

>Do you actually belive this?

I haven't seen a single Google employee (that I know of) here or on other forums who's had a nice thing to say about patents. I'm sure there are some pro-patent Google employees, they just don't seem to post on here :-)

But I don't understand what you mean by "corporate America"... Aren't companies that are complaining loudly about software patents also part of "corporate America"? How is that an echo chamber?

Re: A glimpse into a new programming language under development at Microsoft

#157

Post by asveikau »

grandeb wrote: post #115
moomin wrote: post #31

This is going to be horribly negative so a bit of context first: I'm a professional C# programmer. I love C#, I think it's a great language. But there's a huge downside: C# only works on Windows. This vastly reduces the number of things you can do with it (yeah, I know about Mono). There's nothing here that suggests that this would have anything other than the same restrictions. So, assuming the language develops int…

I miss the HN of old where there were hardcore technical discussions about the merits and demerits of the technical approaches in such posts. Here we have almost none of those and instead there is lot of horse beating about aspects that are not even announced yet, taking sides in big tech politics etc, especially in upvoted comments, a trend which I previously noticed slowly dominated and then killed Slashdot. I gues…

I haven't been on here long enough to remember an HN of old, but I totally agree that on a lot of topics the depth is lacking here. Witness that TFA is all about how GC makes C# kind of suck, and that is the big thing they are trying to fix. Any commenters showing signs of grokking this? Nope, they are mostly talking about C# being awesome.

I think a lot of folks here have a hard time thinking about a world without GC or that GC might ever be a bad thing.

Re: A glimpse into a new programming language under development at Microsoft

#158

Post by dubcanada »

sillysaurus2 wrote: post #62
moomin wrote: post #31

This is going to be horribly negative so a bit of context first: I'm a professional C# programmer. I love C#, I think it's a great language. But there's a huge downside: C# only works on Windows. This vastly reduces the number of things you can do with it (yeah, I know about Mono). There's nothing here that suggests that this would have anything other than the same restrictions. So, assuming the language develops int…

C# only works on Windows. This vastly reduces the number of things you can do with it (yeah, I know about Mono). Speaking of Mono, does anyone know of a good resource for C#/.NET devs to learn how to port their Windows apps to Linux/Mac relatively easily? I did a writeup a month ago about my first impressions of Mono: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6744622 In short, there don't seem to be very many "Here's how…

If you want to write cross platform applications use Qt. End of story, it's the only extremely well supported cross platform GUI framework out there. If you are looking for a smaller framework you can try WxWidgets, but I would stay away from GTK. GTK has been getting less and less support since version 2. Version 3 is only Mac and Linux and the Mac version is terrible, there is a "custom" Windows version by some french guy, but it's just that, not community supported.

You could also take a look at Juce, depending on what you need to do with it.

But, if you don't mind large binaries you could easily embed a chromium or awesomium layer as your frontend and do your frontend in html/css/javascript and use JavaScript to communicate with your backend.

As people as said, the best idea would be to write one backend and three or two frontends. That will give you the best experience on all three platforms, and the native GUI look, something that on Mac Qt still suffers with.

Re: A glimpse into a new programming language under development at Microsoft

#159

Post by moomin »

computerslol wrote: post #146
moomin wrote: post #31

This is going to be horribly negative so a bit of context first: I'm a professional C# programmer. I love C#, I think it's a great language. But there's a huge downside: C# only works on Windows. This vastly reduces the number of things you can do with it (yeah, I know about Mono). There's nothing here that suggests that this would have anything other than the same restrictions. So, assuming the language develops int…

It looks like you have a very narrow perspective on C#. I've never tried running .net on a non-windows platform, so I can't comment in that space. I'll leave that to someone else. As someone who's built bespoke big data applications, scientific computing (if we're both talking about large scale computation for analytics), desktop applications, server applications/services, and web sites (one of which is within the US…

I think you're missing my point, it's about sweet spots. C# has a sweet spot on windows desktop and ETL style data processing. You could have written all of those things in C++, Java or Python. But the ecosystem isn't there. There's no Hadoop, SciPy, Django or Rails. For crying out loud, just running a less compiler on Windows required someone to sit down and rewrite it from scratch. (The node story has improved on windows since then.)

And none of this looks likely to change. Windows has been a second rate development platform for some time now, and Microsoft don't mind.

Re: A glimpse into a new programming language under development at Microsoft

#160

Post by moomin »

asveikau wrote: post #157
grandeb wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I miss the HN of old where there were hardcore technical discussions about the merits and demerits of the technical approaches in such posts. Here we have almost none of those and instead there is lot of horse beating about aspects that are not even announced yet, taking sides in big tech politics etc, especially in upvoted comments, a trend which I previously noticed slowly dominated and then killed Slashdot. I gues…

I haven't been on here long enough to remember an HN of old, but I totally agree that on a lot of topics the depth is lacking here. Witness that TFA is all about how GC makes C# kind of suck, and that is the big thing they are trying to fix. Any commenters showing signs of grokking this? Nope, they are mostly talking about C# being awesome. I think a lot of folks here have a hard time thinking about a world without G…

For the record, top rated comment here, and I do a fair bit of C++ as well as C# and am fully aware of how awesome have proper control over allocations would be. My frustration is that once they've finished, I don't believe it would be any more use than C# in practice. (There's a nice language struggling to get out of C++14.)

However, Rust exists and is unlikely to be as encumbered as what Microsoft produces.

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